14 January

According to this account of creation, God has established several truths about the natural world and mankind. Primarily, a reader realizes that God is innately “good”, not as a quality but as good itself. Before God’s work, “the earth was a formless void” and lacked goodness. The writer of this account is sure to use strong detail to illustrate the vibrancy of what God had created, which contrasts with what existed before creation. After every event of creation, the author notes that “God saw that it was good”. This phrase is repeated verbatim five times, emphasizing the goodness of creation and matter itself. This detail is critical, because many people have argued throughout history that sin and death have corrupted the world to the point where creation itself is innately bad. The creation account directly disputes this point. God blesses his creation, calling it “very good” on several of the days. He also separates the human person from the rest of creation by creating them “in our image, according to our likeness” and allows them to “have dominion” over the rest of creation. Man and woman are also created on the last day, and God is so satisfied with this final creation that he leaves the seventh day for rest. This reinforces the higher degree of importance God assigns to mankind in comparison to the animals and other aspects of the world. “God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it”, which foreshadows the Sabbath celebrated by the Jews and later by Christians in remembrance of his Son’s death. This serves to demonstrate God’s omnipotence and even hints at his promise to save mankind after the first sin. Obviously, God has no need for rest, because he is free from human frailty and shortcomings. However, by including a day of rest, he acts as an example of how important this day is for humans, to take time away from work for family and prayer.